The threat of rail strikes in France looms over the end of the year, with the first strike scheduled for November 21. They are fueled by worries about jobs and working conditions in the face of national rail company SNCF dismantling its freight business, a further indication of the progressive privatization of the rail industry.
It is a situation that is hardly reassuring when considering similar experiences in other countries, particularly in the United States. Rail freight is just one example of the upheaval of sectors resulting from the first industrial revolutions and shows that, over the last 20 years or so, productivity gains have not been confined to high-tech sectors alone. In just a few years, private US companies have moved from a hub-and-spoke sorting system to one of flexible itineraries with dock-to-dock loading.
By eliminating the need to redirect freight within the same platform onto different trains bound for a final destination, companies have been able to lengthen trains, eliminate machinists’ dead time and reduce unloading personnel and maintenance staff. Profits since 2012 have soared and hours worked have fallen by a third. However, working conditions have worsened with intensified workloads and enforced flexibility), and there are increasing fears that this financial race will eventually result in major safety failures, as it did for Boeing (“Tracking Productivity in Line-Haul Railroads,” Brian Chansky and Michael Schultz, Beyond the Numbers, n° 13/2, 2024).
The worst of the siren calls
It led the rail unions to put forward a series of demands for 2022 that included minimum staffing levels per train, wage increases and paid sick leave. A managerial counter-proposal was widely rejected by the union members. And at the end of 2022, a strike was imminent that, in the wake of the pandemic, risked escalating supply chain difficulties.
In 1916, when the US was preparing for war, Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was faced with a similar threat and Congress gave in to the railroad workers’ demand for an eight-hour day. But the Biden-Harris administration took a completely different path. It asked Congress to pass a bipartisan bill to ratify the management proposal and to block all strikes. Railroad Workers United reacted immediately: “This is a legacy-defining moment for Joe Biden. He is going down as one of the greatest disappointments in labor history.” More than 500 historians took the exceptional step of writing to Biden to condemn the Biden-Harris administration’s historic error and warn him of the domino effect of major decisions concerning transport workers.
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